The Money May Be Lacking, but a Library Refuses to Go Quietly

Friday

As Central Falls, R.I., fought bankruptcy, a state-appointed receiver closed the library. But residents decided it was something they couldn’t do without.

Correction Appended

If you were to assemble a city from scratch, you would need a few things to make this place of yours more than just a functioning municipality; to make it a community. So, along with a City Hall and a few schools, you would have a building where an elephant king named Babar rules, where it is a sin to kill a mockingbird and where everyone from Homer to Snooki has a story to tell.

That is, you would need a library.

But in the losing battle of the square-mile city of Central Falls to avoid bankruptcy this year, parts of what made this municipality a community became expendable, among them: the Adams Memorial Library, a handsome Greek Revival building that for a century has been an intellectual refuge amid an urban expanse of triple-deckers and old mills.

In July, a state-appointed receiver closed the library to save money. The six staff members lost their jobs, while residents lost access to the statewide network that allowed them to borrow from the libraries of other towns. The handsome building went dark, its books unread, its videos unwatched, its computers unavailable to those looking for jobs.

But some people refused to close the book on a place that deeply mattered to this financially poor, ethnically rich city. Central Falls has more than enough boarded-up buildings; no need to add its library, too.

The library’s survival hinged on the fact that while its operating costs are covered by the city, the building itself is owned by a private trust. Seizing the moment, the trust’s board of directors used this enforced downtime to make repairs in the old building and to install a library card system for Central Falls alone.

A month later, on Aug. 1, the Adams Memorial Library reopened with limited hours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Its reference and checkout desks are now staffed by a rotating band of volunteers, including Jerauld Adams, 41, the board chairman of the library trust, and Thomas Shannahan, 68, a board member and former director of the library. They hung a sign on the front door that said, with some defiance:

“Welcome to YOUR library.”

Mr. Shannahan, bearded and wiry, ran the library from 1989 until 2004, when he resigned amid some political strife; in Central Falls, it seems, there is always political strife. He grew up a couple of blocks from the library, in a building that included the family residence, a rooming house, his father’s bar and a cocktail lounge called the Nut House — at one time a “jumping joint,” he said.

The bar and cocktail lounge are gone, as are the Holy Trinity Catholic church and parochial school that Mr. Shannahan attended as a boy. But the library is still here, he said with pride, as he walked past several patrons hunched before computers aglow with Facebook chatter.

Above him was the building’s dome, a haven to squirrels before its restoration 20 years ago. In the basement below, a modest room grandly called the Rose L. McCormick Memorial Auditorium, named after a beloved librarian and used as a meeting place for various groups. And all around, the paintings of Lorenzo de Nevers, a French-Canadian artist who lived here and whose many subjects included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

These are things and details peculiar and important to Central Falls.

While the need for a library is made obvious by the presence of dozens of people a day, especially children, its future remains uncertain. One proposal, for example, calls for regionalizing service; Central Falls residents would join the Pawtucket library, while the Adams library would have no specific purpose.

In other words, proud Central Falls would lose some autonomy, and a piece of itself.

Mr. Adams, the library trust’s chairman, prefers a more innovative plan that would cobble together state aid, grant money from foundations, and the trust’s endowment to pay for a smaller staff and a return to the statewide library system. Cost-saving methods would include having the city’s school librarians work a shift a week at the Adams library.

Mr. Adams, a tall, boyish entrepreneur who renovates and sells old buildings, said that the news of the library’s predicament had prompted dozens of donations, from a $10 bill to a $10,000 check from a bank representing an anonymous client.

“I wrote them all a nice letter of thanks,” he said.

On Friday night, the Adams trust held a fund-raising event on the grounds of the library. Donors mingled under the steady gaze of the long-gone subjects of an all-but-forgotten artist, who once lived here.

Tickets were $100 apiece — necessary, perhaps, but steep.

“I don’t think there’s going to be too many Central Falls residents at 100 bucks a whack,” said Mr. Shannahan, who knows this place.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of a summary of this article, which appeared on the home page and the national section of NYTimes.com, incorrectly referred to Central Falls, R.I., as Central Hills.

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